NerdBeach

The Rings of … Mars?

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Image by Tushar Mittal using Celestia 2001–2010, Celestia Development Team

 

It could be that our close neighbor planet Mars is going to imitate Saturn and get rings of its own. That is, after Phobos is finally pulled apart by Mars. Already Phobos, the largest of Mars’ two moons, is lined with what is thought to be “lunar stretch marks”. According to Terry Hurford of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Centre,

We think that Phobos has already started to fail, and the first sign of this failure is the production of these grooves.

While Phobos may indeed be failing, you don’t need to panic just yet – the process will probably take place over the next 30 – 50 million years. While the theory of the destruction of Phobos due to tidal forces was raised years ago and discounted, new research into the core of Phobos has it as a rubble center surrounded by a powdery surface regolith a mere 100 meters thick. So, the tidal forces model now works, and it fits.

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courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona

 

And when Phobos does break apart, it looks like it will join other planets in our solar system in having a ringed structure. Once the destruction does take place, it will happen quickly, taking only a few days or weeks to complete. As researcher Benjamin Black was quoted in Nature,

If you were standing on the surface of Mars, you could grab a lawn chair and watch Phobos shearing out and spreading into a big circle.

Now wouldn’t that be a cosmic show to see?

 

Dunes of Mars

Across the southern Martian Noachis Terra region, sand patterns are created by wind blown sand, resulting in unique forms whose structure is dependent on the tiny size of Martian sand grains.

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Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ. of Arizona

Explore Mars and the Curiosity Rover Through a Panorama

Do you wish that you could get up close to Mars and the Curiosity Rover? Then consider taking a look at this 360Cities Panorama. I suggest you hit the full screen button and take it for a relaxing virtual visit. If you look at the top of the rover, you might notice the Mars rocks and dust on the rover, no doubt debris from the landing.

 

Curiosity Rover

The Curiosity rover is a robotic, car-sized rover exploring Gale Crater on Mars. The Curiosity Mars rover carries a radioisotope-powered mobile scientific laboratory and is part of NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission by the United States. The MSL mission has four main scientific goals: investigation of the Martian climate, geology, and whether Mars could have ever supported life, including investigation of the role of water and its planetary habitability.

Curiosity was launched from Cape Canaveral on November 26, 2011 at 10:02 EST aboard the MSL spacecraft and successfully landed on Aeolis Palus in Gale Crater on Mars on August 6, 2012, 05:17:57.3 UTC.[6] The final landing place for the rover was less than 2.4 km (1.5 mi) from its target after a 563,000,000 km (350,000,000 mi) journey

source:wikipedia